Betrayal
by HiddenDepths-x
Summary: Angsty little oneshot which sort of wrote itself. Ron has done the unthinkable, but why did he do it? And more importantly, can Hermione bring herself to forgive him?


Slamming the door shut behind her, Hermione flung herself down onto the floor and screamed silently into the carpet. This could not be happening – it wasn't possible.

There was a banging as he began hammering on the door.

'Hermione, let me in! Please, let me explain.'

She felt a fury like no other begin to build up inside her, and oh she was definitely getting over the shock now. So he wanted to explain, did he? Explain why he had broken her heart into a thousand tiny pieces? Just let him try.

'Hermione I'll break this door down, I swear. You need to hear me out!'

'Go away,' she said listlessly, and Hermione found that was all she _could_ say. She couldn't seem to stop shaking.

'Right, you better be out of the way cos I'm coming in!' Scrambling back from the door, Hermione went for her wand to cast an Imperturbable, but no sooner had she pointed it at the door than Ron burst in, smashing through the wood and steel as if it were nothing.

Looking up at him through narrowed, tear stained eyes, she raised her wand to his face.

'Don't think I won't,' she whispered venomously.

'Do what you like,' Ron said simply, sinking down against the remains of the door, 'I deserve it.' She looked at him, pathetic, head in his hands, and found that she had been wrong – it turned out she could get angrier.

'You're not worth the effort,' she spat, and she saw him flinch as she sprang to her feet and ran towards the stairs in an effort to get into a room, any room, that she could be alone in.

She felt rather than heard Ron drag himself to his feet and come clumsily after her. His hand clamped down on her arm as she reached the first stair, and she felt the magic surge through her as he was thrown backwards by its power. She didn't look back.

As she reached the top step she heard Ron shout, and was in no state to try and counter the spell he threw at her. She felt the invisible ropes binding her, and she fell heavily to the ground, thrashing about but knowing there was no way to escape from these bonds. Ron's spellwork had improved considerably since their days at school.

He was standing over her, then picking her up, and so help her she kicked and screamed but it was no use. He carried her down to the living room and laid her down on the couch before collapsing into the chair opposite. He looked exhausted, and Hermione felt sick as she thought about why that was.

'Let me go,' she said icily, 'and then get the hell out of here. I don't want to see you. Ever.' She saw the hurt spasm across his face, but she didn't care – for once in his life he was right. He deserved everything she threw at him.

'Mione please, you have to let me explain why-'

'DON'T call me that!' she shrieked, all composure long gone. 'I don't want to know! Can't you understand that!'

'No,' said Ron, 'because if it was me then I'd want to know why. So I can't understand that, Hermione.'

'It would never be _you_,' she screamed, 'because I would never have done that in the first place!'

'You think I don't know that?' Ron replied, 'You think I don't know how much of an idiot I am? You can do whatever you like to me afterwards, but please, just give me the chance to explain.'

'Why should I?' Hermione asked, looking him in the eyes for the first time since he had broken down the door.

'Because you have to. Because I love you.'

'Don't you DARE talk to me about love,' she spat, enraged, 'if you loved me like you say you do you couldn't have done it.'

'That's not true,' said Ron sadly. 'It's because I love you so much that it happened.'

'What?' Hermione said incredulously. 'Am I actually hearing this? You've come out with some amount of utter rubbish since we met Ron, but you've really out-done yourself this time. You love me so much that you picked up a woman in a bar and took her back to Harry's flat?'

'That's not fair, Hermione.' Ron sighed loudly, and Hermione felt the anger coarse through her again just as intensely as before.

'Let me tell you what's _unfair, _Ron, what's unfair is me coming round to find you to try and sort out our problems and finding you in bed with my _cousin_! And don't you dare flinch,' she said as he turned his face from her. 'If you can do it then you can hear it said!'

'Hermione, I-'

'Say it, Ron,' she interrupted, a glint in her eye, 'tell me that you did it. I want to hear you say it.'

'I… I can't-' he stammered as he looked across the room at her in disbelief.

'You bloody well can! You did it, now tell me.'

'NO!'

'Say it! You owe me that much at least!'

'All right,' he said, defeat etched across his face, 'all right. I did it. I… I slept with Sophia.'

Hermione felt the last remaining piece of her heart shatter as she heard him utter those words, but she wasn't finished yet. She wanted to make him suffer, to make him feel half of what she was feeling.

'Right,' she said, trying and failing to sound like this was a normal conversation, 'so how was she?' Ron's head spun round and he stared at her in shock.

'What?'

'You heard me.' Hermione was breathing heavily, fighting against the sobs that threatened to completely overwhelm her entire body. 'Was she any good?'

'Hermione-'

'Answer the question!'

'Fine!' Ron snapped, and Hermione could see the beginnings of that Weasley temper building up behind his eyes. Good. 'You really want to know?'

'Yes,' she said, knowing that she was lying through her teeth.

'She was nothing,' he said quietly, and his anger had disappeared as soon as it had come. 'She was fine, it was fine – but she wasn't you.' Hermione shot him a withering look.

'Really? I had sort of worked that out, Ron, because if it had been me then I doubt we'd be here having this discussion would we?'

'I've had enough,' said Ron suddenly, pulling his wand from his pocket. 'Now you either let me explain or I'll have to use Silencio. Either way you're going to hear me out, and then you can say whatever you like.'

Hermione weighed her options – she didn't have much choice. Realising that against her better judgement a part of her needed to hear this, she looked him in the eyes and saw him blur as the tears built up behind her lashes again.

'Why?' she whispered. Ron visibly sank downwards into the chair, and dropped his head into his hands. There was a pause as he seemed to try to work out where to begin.

'It was… It was after the fight last night,' he said weakly. 'You threw me out, and I thought that this time was it, that you were never going to have me back. I didn't want to see Harry, or Ginny, or Fred, I just wanted to be alone. So I Apparated to muggle London. No-one knew me, and that was what I wanted. And then I bumped into… her. I recognised her from- from-' He broke off as a strangled kind of cry came from deep inside of him.

'From our wedding,' Hermione finished for him, feeling the impact of these words hit her hard.

'Y-yes,' Ron choked out. He swallowed before continuing, and he still wouldn't meet her eyes. 'It was in some pub – I don't know which one, I was too drunk to care. Too drunk to stand.'

'What, so you just decided it would be easier to lie down instead?' Hermione couldn't stop herself from shooting out the pithy remark: it was all she had left. Ron shuddered and then carried on as if she hadn't spoken.

'She could see there was something wrong, and she sat with me. She listened to me, and it had been so long since I'd talked to anyone who didn't know both sides of the story. I just needed someone who wouldn't judge me, who wouldn't condemn me for being the idiot I am. And she was there.'

'So you asked her back to Harry's flat?'

'Yes,' he said quietly, 'but it wasn't like you think. I was sure Harry would be there – I just thought it would be nicer there than in some dingy bar in the middle of nowhere. She wanted to help me to… to fix things with you.' Hermione snorted without meaning to, the anger flaring up inside her again.

'Well that didn't exactly go to plan, did it?' She was silenced when Ron looked up at her with anguished eyes, and she finally realised that he was crying.

In all the years she had known him, she had only seen Ron Weasley cry three times – at Dumbledore's funeral in their sixth year, when he received news of his father's death after the final battle and when he had turned to see her walk down the aisle towards him three years previously. And now the tears were rolling freely down his cheeks as he looked across the room at her, and she was powerless to do anything about it. It worried her that she wanted to, when she knew that the last thing he deserved at this moment from her was pity. But she couldn't help it – he had broken her heart, but she still loved him.

'Look, I have to explain,' he started, breaking into Hermione's reminiscing, 'I have to try. Please.' She hesitated only for a fraction of a second before motioning slightly with her head for him to keep going.

'When we got back, I shouted for Harry but he didn't answer. I went round the whole house, and then figured he'd be here, with you. And that only made me feel worse, because you were sitting at home and I should have been with you, I should have been trying to make it right, but I just couldn't bring myself to Apparate back and have to face the two of you in that state.'

'Harry wasn't here.'

'What?' said Ron, a look of utmost horror on his face.

'He stayed at Ginny's last night,' Hermione said quietly, 'and I didn't get in touch because I didn't want to disturb them.'

'So if I had Apparated back-'

'I was on my own, waiting for you to come home.'

'Oh Merlin,' said Ron. His shoulders began to shake as he dropped his head into his hands again, and Hermione felt even her own broken heart ache for him in that moment when he truly realised what he had done.

'Ron-'

'Wait,' he said hoarsely, holding up his hand to silence her, 'let me finish.' He took a deep breath in and composed himself before continuing. 'When I got back through to the living room Soph- she was sitting on the couch. I collapsed onto it and I think I almost passed out there and then, but instead we started talking. She was asking me all these questions, like she was really interested and wanted to help, and it felt so good to be listened to. These past few months I've just been feeling so alone, and it was like you didn't even know I existed any more unless we were in a fight.'

'That's not true.'

'I know it's not,' said Ron, 'but it's how I felt. It's no excuse, I know that. I'm not trying to give you an excuse, I just need to tell you what happened and why.'

'That's pretty much the definition of an excuse, Ron,' Hermione said sarcastically.

'Hermione I don't care about dictionary definitions right now,' Ron said, breathing heavily as if he was about to start crying again, 'I care about you and your feelings and I want to get this out, because otherwise it'll kill me.'

'Seems to me if you'd cared about my feelings you'd have left that house the moment you realised Harry wasn't there!'

'If I'd been thinking I would have, but I didn't think! I was devastated Mione, you have to believe that. I thought I'd lost you for good.'

'So you decided to punish me by making an idiot out of me?'

'No!' Ron burst out. 'That's not it at all!' He paused for a second, as if considering his words, and Hermione saw vividly each tiny bead of sweat that had gathered in his hairline, each grimy tear track down his face, each tic of the muscle in his cheek. She knew him so well, yet she had never seen him this agitated. Well, she had thought she knew him – now, everything was different. She saw him open his mouth to continue, and tried to concentrate on what he was saying.

'Eventually I stopped answering her questions, I just couldn't bring myself to speak any more, and she started shouting at me, she was pretty drunk herself. She was saying all this stuff, just stuff to try and make me feel better. And then…' He tailed off as he began to shiver violently.

'What?' Hermione asked tentatively, knowing that whatever came next, it wasn't going to be easy to hear. But then, nothing about this morning had been easy.

'Then she said… something,' Ron stammered. 'She said, 'You're not worthless. Everybody means everything to somebody, and you mean everything to her.' Merlin Hermione, it's what you said to me-'

'The day you proposed,' Hermione finished for him quietly. 'It's something my dad used to say all the time.'

'When she said it, it was like I was back there,' Ron continued as if he hadn't heard her, 'and I was just remembering that day, how wonderful I felt when I realised that I was going to be spending the rest of my life with you. I must have been in a daze, because she had to- she had to touch my face and say my name to get my attention. I looked at her, really looked at her for the first time, and I saw you – she has your eyes, Mione. Chocolate brown, deep, so full of emotion that I could get lost just glancing at them. And it suddenly hit me that I was never going to be able to look you in the eyes again, and it was as if all the happiness had been sucked out of me, all the light was gone.

I had to get it back, I needed _you, _I needed you to look me in the eyes and tell me everything was all right, but you weren't there and she was and she looked at me and said 'It's all right, Ron,' and I just did it. I kissed her, because she said exactly what I needed to hear, and I'm so weak and so stupid that it didn't matter that it wasn't you, because in my mind you were one and the same. And now you know.' As soon as he had uttered these last few words he collapsed, hugging his knees to his chest as the sobs he had been holding in wracked his entire body.

Hermione watched as the boy she had once fought so bitterly with, the teenager she had fallen for and the man she had grown to love came apart at the seams in front of her. It was devastating, and though at the same time it was slightly satisfying to see him suffer for the pain he had caused her, it shook her to the core. She let him weep for close to ten minutes without moving an inch, not wanting to intrude on Ron's personal grief for what he – no, _they_ – had lost.

It took her about ten seconds to realise that with or without knowing it Ron had released her from her binds. She shook herself off and got slowly to her feet, not yet knowing what she wanted to do. She thought about what she had said earlier. Did she want to forgive him? She knew she did. He had made a stupid decision based on his own feelings of inadequacy, she knew that, and she also knew that he would never do something this stupid again. But _could_ she forgive him? That was another problem entirely.

She hurt so much it was like she was empty, except that she could still feel everything inside her pressing down like a lead weight in her stomach. Every time she shut her eyes she could see them together, kissing and stroking, but worse still just lying in each other's arms the way she had found them that morning. It made her want to be sick when she thought about Ron sharing that with anyone but her – she had been betrayed, yes, but she felt like she had been violated as well. The memory of Ron had been tainted for her, because he was no longer hers and hers alone. He had been stolen, even if it had only been for one night, and he could never fully be hers again. She had nothing to compare this to, no-one to ask for advice. This was her decision. How far was she willing to go to save her marriage?

Slowly she crossed the room towards Ron, who was now lying face down on the floor shaking violently in complete silence apart from the occasional anguished sob. She bent towards his still form and put her hand on his shoulder lightly, but he convulsed at her touch as if he had received an electric shock. He looked up at her and Hermione felt tears spring to her own eyes again at the desolate look on his face.

'You look like I feel,' she rasped, finding that her throat was dry even though her eyes were not.

'Hermione,' Ron said weakly, 'Hermione I'm so sorry-'

'Please, don't,' she begged, scrambling away from him across the carpet.

'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm just sorry, there's nothing else I can say, Hermione please-'

'Please what?' Hermione whispered, knowing that whatever he was about to ask, she wouldn't be able to say what he wanted to hear.

'Please,' repeated Ron, 'can you-' He stopped, as if trying to steel himself for the words he was about to say. 'Do you think you can ever forgive me?'

'I don't know,' answered Hermione truthfully. Her brain was screaming at her to tell him to get out and never come back, that he had hurt her and that was wrong, but the tiny unbroken part of heart wanted her to take him in her arms and just forget the whole thing.

'Please, Mione. You've got to believe me, it was just a mistake.'

'I know.'

'Then can you forgive me?' He raised his eyes to hers, and in that one moment of connection Hermione felt as though every memory she had ever shared with him had just flooded back into her consciousness. It was overwhelming, and she felt an indescribable mix of emotions build up within her that were impossible to ignore, no matter how hard she tried.

But when it came down to it, it was simple – she was Hermione Granger first, Hermione Weasley second, and Hermione Granger listened to her brain. She always had, and she always would: only once in her life had she gone against this rule, and sitting in front of her was living proof that listening to your heart was useless. It only resulted in pain. She tore her eyes away from Ron's face and looked at the ground.

'I'm sorry,' she said quietly, 'I can't. I just can't.' She heard Ron's sharp intake of breath, and then felt his hands on the sides of her face, gently lifting her chin and forcing her to look at him again.

'Look at me,' he said, 'and then say it.'

'I… I can't forgive you,' she said, but the quiver in her voice was obvious even to her.

'Hermione, I can see it in your eyes,' said Ron shakily, 'I know you want to forgive me. Please – I love you so much-'

'Ron, get out,' she said sharply, pulling back from him again. 'Please, just leave.'

'Tell me you don't love me, and I'll go!' he said, his voice rising as he realised that his chance was slipping away. 'I know you love me just as much as I love you – it was just a mistake, we can get past this-'

'There's no WE anymore, Ron!' Hermione screeched, fighting against the lump in her throat, 'There isn't now and there never will be again! That's just the way it's going to be!'

Ron's eyes went wide, and he stared at her in shock. She refused to look away, trying to radiate all of the hate and anger that she felt towards, concealing the pain and brokenness behind her well-practised mask. Eventually he looked away, unable to stop the hurt spasming across his face and slowly he got to his feet and turned shakily towards the door. Hermione followed him across the room, not trusting herself to speak.

As he reached the open doorway he looked over his shoulder at her, and she had never seen so much pain expressed so vividly than in that one second before he turned and walked away.

'I'll be at The Burrow' she heard him choke out as he made his way down the path of the house they had saved every knut for, 'if you want to talk. I didn't expect much else.' She watched his retreating back as he staggered out of the gate, the same gate he had lovingly painted one afternoon only a few months before, and closed it behind him before vanishing with a loud pop that cut straight through Hermione like a whip.

She walked slowly backwards through the doorway. On autopilot, she pulled out her wand and waved it in the general direction of the shattered remnants of the door.

'Reparo,' she muttered, and the pieces rearranged themselves back into the empty space in the wall, cutting off the noise that had been drifting in from the outside. To the untrained eye it seemed as good as new, but Hermione knew that no matter how good the spellwork, there would forever be magical breaks all the way through the wood, invisible but there nonetheless. It was broken, and nothing in the world could ever fix it. Nothing.

Letting out an anguished howl like a wounded animal, Hermione sunk to her knees and sobbed, knowing that there was no possible way that she could feel any emptier inside. She was incomplete. She was lost. She was alone.


End file.
